Somebody quoted the statistic at me again that week. Rotary has lost twenty percent of its members in the last decade.

I don’t want to hear that number again.

Not because it’s wrong. Because we keep reciting it like a diagnosis when it’s only a symptom, and reciting a symptom has never cured anything.

Here’s what nobody says next.

Gyms have attrition. Insurance agents have attrition. Cell phone carriers have attrition. Several of them lose a bigger share of their people every year than we do.

They have one thing we don’t.

They have a plan to refill the bucket.

We aren’t losing members faster than everyone else. We’re just the only ones who seem surprised.

This Started Before I Did

In January 2020, before the world shut down, twenty leaders from across North America were brought to headquarters for two days to work out how to create more innovative clubs.

Their conclusion was blunt. Not enough existing clubs will change enough, or fast enough, to solve this on their own. We need new pathways into the organization for the people the current one doesn’t fit.

I wasn’t in that room. I was in Lenoir, North Carolina, spending fourteen months asking people whether I was allowed to do the thing I eventually just did.

One line from that meeting stayed with the people who were there. We won’t measure this during my year. Look out five years.

Most of what actually changes an organization gets planted by somebody who won’t be in the chair when it grows.

The Question I Ask Instead of Recruiting

People come to me and say, send me the plan. Send me the deck.

There is no deck. There’s one question, and it isn’t about membership at all.

Tell me about your club.

Sit a Rotarian down and ask that, then get out of the way. They brag. They tell you about the scholarship they fund and the park they rebuilt and the member who hasn’t missed a meeting in thirty years.

And somewhere in the middle of telling you what they love, they hear the gap themselves. They name what’s missing without me ever pointing at it.

We don’t talk about recruiting until step three. By then it isn’t recruiting. It’s a club going after something it has already decided it wants.

Even when nothing comes of it, I got to learn about your club. That’s never once been a wasted hour.

Nine and a Half Months

Let me be practical with the governors, because the calendar is crueler than the arithmetic.

July is gone. Your new presidents are learning how to ring the bell. Membership month is August, so that’s when most clubs start. Then Thanksgiving arrives and nothing meaningful happens until the second week of January. And by the first of June your president is already handing the year to a successor.

At best you have nine and a half months.

That’s why I’ve run out of patience with theory. Not because theory is wrong. We have already had the theory. We’ve had years of it.

What we don’t have is time.

They Aren’t Numbers

The twenty percent isn’t a statistic.

It’s the teacher who can’t come to the noon meeting. It’s the young parent juggling a job and a car seat. It’s the person straight out of school, carrying student debt, who wants in and has already decided they can’t afford us.

Every leader gets one choice, and it’s the same choice every year.

Create or decline.

I’ve made mine. We aren’t going to price people out of Rotary. We aren’t going to schedule people out of Rotary. And we aren’t going to leave people out of Rotary.